Tag Archives: Solidoodle

3D Printing – Part 3

The last couple of weeks, I have talked about how I got started in 3D printing, including setting up my software toolchain, and selecting the 3D printer I wanted to get. This week, I wanted to talk about a project I’ve been poking at for a couple of weeks, and have finally gotten to the point where I have produced some positive results.

You see, I like spaceships. And games that feature spaceships. While the first game that probably comes to mind is EVE Online, the project I started with is actually for Sins of a Solar Empire. In particular, Sins of a Solar Empire has a very active modding community, and Ironclad has provided the community with a great tool chain for doing just about anything to the game – including messing with the models. So, with very little effort, a little bit of perl (and, actually, without having to download anything), I was able to extract the meshes for the capital ships and export them to .stl files. If you remember from my first post, getting an STL file is the first step toward getting something to print on a 3D printer.

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3D Printing – Part 2

Last time, I talked a bit about the 3D printing tool chain, and how I determined whether 3D printing was something that I could actually do. This time, I want to talk about something a little different – how I determined whether 3D printing was something that I could actually afford to do. In particular, what factors contributed most to my choice of a printer, what the main options were (as I saw them), and a little bit about what I thought once I had actually received my printer.

In looking for printers, the first thing I really wanted to decide was whether I wanted to get a 3D printer kit (like a RepRap) or whether I wanted to get an assembled printer. My first thought was that getting an assembled printer was out of my price range, so I didn’t look too closely, rather, I looked at a lot of kits, and spent a lot of time pouring over the instructions for putting them together. This might seem a bit odd, since I didn’t even have one yet, but I really wanted to know if this was something I was going to be able to do before I spent a lot of money shipping a bucket of parts to my house. At this point, the front-runners were the Mendel from RepRapPro (hadn’t decided on mono or tricolor), and one other which I don’t remember (except that it actually shipped with a soda can as a legitimate part). The price seemed reasonable, and it seemed like I was getting everything I needed to be up and running.

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3D Printing – Part 1

At around the beginning of the year, I started looking into 3D printing – what it was about, how it had evolved to this point, what the various options were, and what the workflows looked like. After looking at the various options and price ranges, as well as getting some helpful advice from some friends, I finally decided I wanted to do some 3D printing at home, and that I would get a 3D printer.

Before I even ordered one, however, I wanted to get a feel for the workflow of a project. I knew I wanted to start with as much freeware as possible so that I could figure out where the rough edges were, and know what I would want to get from anything not-free.

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